The Lost Battles Read online

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2010 Jonathan Jones

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are

  registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Originally published in Great Britain in slightly different form by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd., London, in 2010.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jones, Jonathan.

  The lost battles : Leonardo, Michelangelo, and the artistic duel that defined the Renaissance/by Jonathan Jones. pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references.

  1. Michelangelo Buonarroti, 1475–1564. 2. Leonardo, da Vinci,

  1452–1519. 3. Renaissance—Italy. I. Title.

  N6923.B9J66 2012

  709.2’2—dc23 2012018978

  Jacket images: (top and bottom) Florence in 1480. “Catena Map” detail showing the Duomo, Piazza della Signoria, and Palazzo Vecchio. Museo di Firenze com’era, Florence, Italy. Scala/Art Resource, NY; (left) Leonardo da Vinci. Interfoto/Sammlung Rauch/Mary Evans; (right) Michelangelo. Private Collection/Ken Welsh/The Bridgeman Art Library

  Jacket design by Linda Huang

  eISBN: 978-0-307-96101-3

  v3.1

  FOR MY DAUGHTER, PRIMAVERA

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  List of Illustrations

  Introduction

  PART ONE

  Genius in the Streets, 1503–4

  ONE The Insult

  TWO The Fame Machine

  THREE Heroics

  FOUR Stoning David

  FIVE The Ascent of Art

  PART TWO

  The Art of War, 1504–5

  SIX Bloodstains

  SEVEN The Genius in His Study

  EIGHT Naked Truth

  NINE Master of War

  TEN The Raid

  ELEVEN The Great Swan

  TWELVE Hell’s Mouth

  PART THREE

  The Lost Battles, 1506–Present

  THIRTEEN The Good Citizen

  FOURTEEN School of the World

  FIFTEEN Prisoners

  Color Photo Insert

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Appendix: The Works of Art

  Acknowledgements

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  itr.1 Daniele da Volterra, Bust of Michelangelo, 1564–6. Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, NY

  itr.2 Francesco Melzi, attrib., Portrait of Leonardo da Vinci, circa 1515. Supplied by Royal Collection Trust / © HM Queen Elizabeth II 2012

  1.1 The “Chain Map” of Florence, circa 1480. Scala / Art Resource, NY

  2.1 Donatello, Judith, circa 1446–60. Scala / Art Resource, NY

  2.2 Fra Bartolommeo, Portrait of Fra Girolamo Savonarola, circa 1498. Scala / Art Resource, NY

  2.3 Santi di Tito, Portrait of Niccolò Machiavelli, later sixteenth century. Scala / Art Resource, NY

  2.4 Raphael, Portrait of Maddalena Strozzi Doni, circa 1506–7. Scala / Art Resource, NY

  3.1 View of David and the Captives, Accademia Gallery, Florence. Alinari / Art Resource, NY

  4.1 Botticelli, Adoration of the Magi, circa 1475. Scala / Art Resource, NY

  4.2 Botticelli, Primavera, circa 1481–2. Scala / Art Resource, NY

  5.1 Leonardo da Vinci, studies for the casting of the Sforza horse, early 1490s. Supplied by Royal Collection Trust / © HM Queen Elizabeth II 2012

  5.2 Leonardo da Vinci, The Last Supper, circa 1495–7. Scala/Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali / Art Resource, NY

  6.1 Leonardo da Vinci, sketches for The Battle of Anghiari (autumn 1503–4). Scala / Art Resource, NY

  6.2 Leonardo da Vinci, sketches for The Battle of Anghiari (autumn 1503–4). Cameraphoto Arte, Venice / Art Resource, NY

  6.3 Leonardo da Vinci, sketches for The Battle of Anghiari (autumn 1503–4). Scala / Art Resource, NY

  7.1 Michelangelo, A Battle Scene and other studies, 1504. © The Trustees of the British Museum / Art Resource, NY

  7.2 Michelangelo, architectural sketches and poetry, 1504. © The Trustees of the British Museum / Art Resource, NY

  7.3 Façade of Santa Maria Novella, Florence, architect Leon Battista Alberti, probably begun about 1458. Vanni / Art Resource, NY

  7.4 Leonardo da Vinci, the layers of the brain and scalp compared with the layers of an onion (early 1490s). Supplied by Royal Collection Trust / © HM Queen Elizabeth II 2012

  7.5 Michelangelo, A Male Nude, 1504–5. Foto Marburg / Art Resource, NY

  8.1 Michelangelo, A Seated Nude, 1504–5. © The Trustees of the British Museum / Art Resource, NY

  8.2 Michelangelo, figure for The Battle of Cascina, 1504–5. Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, NY

  8.3 Michelangelo, figure for The Battle of Cascina, 1504–5. Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, NY

  8.4 Leonardo da Vinci, sketches for Leda and horse studies, circa 1504. Alinari / Art Resource, NY

  9.1 Leonardo da Vinci, designs for cannon and guns, 1480s. Supplied by Royal Collection Trust / © HM Queen Elizabeth II 2012

  9.2 Leonardo da Vinci, Neptune, circa 1504. Alinari / Art Resource, NY

  10.1 Antonio Pollaiuolo, Battle of Naked Men, 1465. Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY

  10.2 Raphael, Self-Portrait, 1504–6. Scala / Art Resource, NY

  10.3 Raphael, Portrait of Pope Julius II, 1511. © National Gallery, London / Art Resource, NY

  11.1 Leonardo da Vinci, studies of The Infant Christ and a Cat, late 1470s–circa 1480. © The Trustees of the British Museum / Art Resource, NY

  11.2 Leonardo da Vinci, studies of horsemen, 1503–4. © The Trustees of the British Museum / Art Resource, NY

  11.3 Leonardo da Vinci, notes on safe flying and wing design, 1505. Photoservice Electa / Art Resource, NY

  12.1 Unknown sixteenth-century artist, The Battle of Anghiari. Alinari / Art Resource, NY

  12.2 Piero della Francesca, The Baptism of Christ, 1450s. © National Gallery, London / Art Resource, NY

  12.3 Paolo Uccello, The Battle of San Romano, probably circa 1438–40. © National Gallery, London / Art Resource, NY

  12.4 Lion’s head helmet, Italy, circa 1475–80. Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY

  12.5 Helmet (Burgonet) alla Romana antica, Milan, circa 1550–5. © Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge / Art Resource, NY

  13.1 Michelangelo, Running Nudes, 1504–5. Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, NY

  13.2 Michelangelo, Brutus, circa 1542. Scala/Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali / Art Resource, NY

  13.3 Salone dei Cinquecento, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. Scala / Art Resource, NY

  14.1 Michelangelo, The Flood, Sistine Chapel, Rome, 1508–12. Scala / Art Resource, NY

  14.2 Bronzino, An Allegory with Venus and Cupid, circa 1545. © National Gallery, London / Art Resource, NY

  15.1 Michelangelo, tomb of Giuliano de’ Medici, 1519–34. Scala / Art Resource, NY

  15.2 Michelangelo, Capture of Rebellious Slave, circa 1513–16. Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, NY

  15.3 Michelangelo, Night, 1525–30. Scala / Art Resource, NY

  15.4 Michelangelo and others, St. Peter’s Basilica, Rome, works by Michelangelo, 1546–64. Vanni / Art Resource, NY

  COLOR INSERT:

  page 1

  15.5 Cosimo Rosselli, attrib., The Execution of Savonarola, circa 1498. Scala / Art Res
ource, NY

  15.6 Titian, The Bacchanal of the Andrians, circa 1523–5. Scala / Art Resource, NY

  15.7 Raphael, The Entombment, 1507. Scala/Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali / Art Resource, NY

  page 2

  15.8 Leonardo da Vinci, The Mona Lisa. Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, NY

  page 3

  15.9 Michelangelo, Sistine Chapel Ceiling, 1508–12. Scala / Art Resource, NY

  page 4

  15.10 Michelangelo, compositional drawing for The Battle of Cascina, 1504–5. Alinari / Art Resource, NY

  15.11 Leonardo da Vinci, Heads of Two Soldiers, 1504–5. © The Museum of Fine Arts Budapest/Scala / Art Resource, NY

  15.12 Michelangelo, A Male Nude, 1504–5. Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, NY

  page 5

  15.13 Leonardo da Vinci, Proportion Studies and Horsemen, 1503–4. Cameraphoto Arte, Venice / Art Resource, NY

  15.14 Leonardo da Vinci, studies of expression in Horses, Lions and Humans, 1503–4. Supplied by Royal Collection Trust / © HM Queen Elizabeth II 2012

  15.15 Leonardo da Vinci, Galloping Cavalry and Footsoldiers, 1503–4. Supplied by Royal Collection Trust / © HM Queen Elizabeth II 2012

  page 6

  15.16 Leonardo da Vinci, Horse Study, 1503–4. Supplied by Royal Collection Trust / © HM Queen Elizabeth II 2012

  15.17 Michelangelo, vestibule of the Laurentian Library, Florence, 1523–33, and staircase 1555–8. Alinari / Art Resource, NY

  15.18 Leonardo da Vinci, Mortars Bombarding a Fortification, circa 1504. Alinari / Art Resource, NY

  page 7

  15.19 Michelangelo, Doni Tondo, circa 1504–7. Scala / Art Resource, NY

  15.20 Michelangelo, The Battle of the Centaurs, 1492. Scala / Art Resource, NY

  page 8

  15.21 Michelangelo, David, 1501–4. Scala/Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali / Art Resource, NY

  page 9

  15.22 Michelangelo, Bacchus, 1496–7. Scala / Art Resource, NY

  page 10

  15.23 Leonardo da Vinci, Foetus in the Womb, circa 1510. Supplied by Royal Collection Trust / © HM Queen Elizabeth II 2012

  page 11

  15.24 Leonardo da Vinci, Muscles and Veins of the Arm and Chest, and Head of an Old Man, circa 1509–10. Supplied by Royal Collection Trust / © HM Queen Elizabeth II 2012

  page 12

  15.25 Michelangelo, Rondanini Pietà, 1550s–64. Scala / Art Resource, NY

  INTRODUCTION

  The candles cast a flickering light on flayed skin and exposed sinews. Leonardo da Vinci takes his knife and scrapes away more flesh from the arm, trying to make sense of the chaos revealed by his knife. With his left hand he makes a rapid sketch. As dawn breaks, the first rays of the sun catch the waxen face of the dead man. Bells in the hospital chapel ring for early-morning mass.

  This is the image of his own life that Leonardo paints in a passage in his notebooks on the vocation of the anatomist. Introducing his subtle, tender, yet precise drawings based on his own dissections of human bodies, he declaims:

  And you, who say it would be better to watch an anatomical demonstration than to see these drawings, you would be right, if it were possible to see all the things the drawings demonstrate in the dissection of a single body, which with all your intelligence you will not see, nor get knowledge of more than a few veins … as one single body did not last long enough, it was necessary to proceed bit by bit with many bodies, until I had completed the research; which I did twice in order to see the differences.

  Beyond all these practical challenges lie emotional and psychological barriers:

  And if you should have a love of such things, you might be stopped by your disgust, and if that did not hinder you, then perhaps by the fear of spending the night hours in the company of those dead bodies, quartered and flayed and terrifying to behold.

  It is the last sentence that arrests the reader. Leonardo created his beautiful anatomical drawings under the most harrowing circumstances. He spent his nights among the dead, contemplating their eviscerated flesh, struggling with his own horror. How did he ever embark on such a strange adventure?

  Leonardo da Vinci had a lifelong interest in anatomy—he had a lifelong interest in all aspects of human existence, and in all of nature—but the great drawings he made of dissected bodies were begun in 1508 as work fizzled out on one of the most ambitious projects he ever undertook. If that project failed—if—then it gave life to what is in some ways Leonardo’s greatest body of work. It is only necessary to compare his drawings of heart valves, facial muscles, the brain, and the sinews of an arm with the harsh, gory prints in the slightly later work of the first modern anatomist, Vesalius, to see how miraculous Leonardo’s eye was. His studies of the human frame are at once scientifically meticulous and artistically exceptional: each pen stroke aches with wonder. On timeworn yellow and blue sheets of paper, he touches into rich life shades and nuances of bone and muscle. Veins hang like the roots of a plant; the interior of a heart resembles a cathedral. Profound love of creation pulses in these drawings. Out of his nights of horror, Leonardo reveals a deep poetic admiration for the human creature.

  At the same moment, another artist is daring just as much, for an equally magnificent reward. Michelangelo Buonarroti climbs a wooden ladder to the platform he has built on wooden rafters slotted just beneath the arched Gothic vaulting of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. It is 1508 and he is starting the commission of his life, to paint the soaring ceiling of the Pope’s personal place of worship. Within months Michelangelo will dismiss most of his team of assistants and turn his labour in the chapel into a struggle to impose a personal vision of humanity’s place in the cosmos onto this lofty interior. As Michelangelo plants his feet firmly on the wooden boards to start to fill the empty vault above him, he is just as conscious as Leonardo of his own heroism. His enterprise in the Sistine Chapel is a cruel physical trial. Only a young and fit man could take on such a thing—while Leonardo da Vinci is fifty-six years old in 1508, Michelangelo is thirty-three. In the kind of coincidence the younger artist relished, it is the age of Christ when he endured the cross. As he forces his tired body to keep its balance day after day, raising his leaden arm to brush bright colours onto the fictional heavens above, Michelangelo comes to see his labour as a strange torture, a ritual of pain. In a poem he describes what it feels like to stand on the scaffolding with his head bent back, his arm raised and his face covered in paint:

  Beard to the sky, I feel my brain

  on my hump, I have the breast of a harpy,

  and the brush constantly above me

  makes, as it drips, a rich pavement of my face.

  It’s tempting to speculate that he actually wrote these lines on the scaffolding, for as he looked down at the floor far below he would have found his image of a “rich pavement”—the chapel has a brightly coloured pavement of particoloured marbles, a kaleidoscopic mosaic like Michelangelo’s own paint-spattered face. It was observed by a nineteenth-century art historian that Michelangelo portrayed creation no less than five times on the chapel’s ceiling, as God divides light from darkness, makes the sun and moon, hovers over the waters, gives life to Adam, and creates Eve. It is as if the artist was depicting his own creative genius in the vault of the heavens.

  These two titanic talents were leaping to new heights of ambition and courage in 1508. They were working heroically—daring the dark, braving the heights. It is one of the great moments in cultural history, the epoch of the High Renaissance. In the hands of Leonardo and Michelangelo in the early sixteenth century, the art of the Italian Renaissance becomes fully conscious, lucid, and complete.

  The anatomical studies of Leonardo and the painted ceiling of Michelangelo could not seem more antithetical. As Leonardo draws tiny scientific images of dissected organs in fragile notebooks, Michelangelo paints huge figures on a vault at the heart of papal power. Yet a rivalry between the two artists lies just beneath
the surface of these works. Leonardo in making the greatest drawings anyone has ever created of the dissected human form sets out to challenge Michelangelo’s unequalled sculptures of the nude body—to outdo the younger man’s muscular nudes by looking deeper, exposing the inner fabric of muscles themselves. Meanwhile, on a colossal scale in the Sistine Chapel, his younger rival paints his answer to Leonardo’s notebooks with their teeming imaginative wonders. The image of the book is unavoidable on the Sistine Ceiling. Michelangelo portrays prophets and sibyls opening gigantic tomes: with its many layers of fiction and decoration, his complex painting resembles a vast illuminated text. It is a history of the cosmos, the book of time. From a religious perspective that is the opposite of Leonardo’s sceptical science, it sets out to eclipse the older man’s intellect as well as his art.

  These rivalries and parallels come of intense mutual observation. When Leonardo and Michelangelo worked simultaneously on science and cosmology in the years just after 1508, they were rebounding from a competition that deeply affected both their lives. This book tells the story of that competition.

  The climax of the Italian Renaissance was not reached in a healthy dialogue of great minds. It was the outcome of savage, merciless rivalry. In the 1490s Leonardo and Michelangelo both, independently, developed a new kind of classical art, more lucid than any previous Italian attempt to revive the style of ancient Greece and Rome, and more eloquent in its capacity to make monumental statements. But what forged this new art into the full grandeur of the “High Renaissance”—the supreme age that lasted from 1504 to the 1520s, when Michelangelo designed his Laurentian Library in Florence—was a brutal confrontation between them.

  In 1503 Leonardo was commissioned to paint a mural of a famous historical episode, the Battle of Anghiari, in the Great Council Hall of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. In 1504, as he was planning his painting, his junior Michelangelo was invited to paint a rival work, The Battle of Cascina, in the same room. It became a competition to discover which of the two was—in the words of Piero Soderini, the republican head of state who commissioned the pictures and launched the competition—“the greatest artist in the world.”